Turtle Valley

by Gail Anderson-Dargatz

“Let’s get you back to bed,” I said to Mom, and I led her by the arm to her bed in the parlour.

  As she lay down, Mom looked up at me with those ghostly eyes. Without her glasses, she searched my face, unable to focus. “Ezra wanted to help you, to be with you,” Mom said. She touched my cheek. “Let him help you.”

  “I’ll try.” But I didn’t want to go back to the bed I shared with him. Not now. I ran a hand over her forehead, through her thick grey hair. “You get some sleep.”

  I KNOCKED LIGHTLY ON THE DOOR to my father’s room and opened it. On the hospital bed my father lay in his pajamas, dreaming morphine dreams. His eyes were closed and his face was turned away—already he was distancing himself from us—and yet I could see his old face in the mirror of the bureau, surrounded by the family photos Val had placed there: Val and myself taken when I was two; the last photo of my grandmother as she carried that carpetbag down the streets of Kamloops; the one of Valentine in the garden; Uncle Dan, his face hidden behind a gas mask, taken during the Second World War; my own wedding photo, and my parents,’ one that was obviously taken by a family member or a neighbour, not by a professional photographer. In this photo my father was thin and boyish, with a head of thick red hair, not the balding, corpulent man I had known my whole life, not this frail old man in the bed in front of me. In the photo, he held my mother’s elbow as if to guide her. My mother wore a simple flowered frock, and she looked not up into the camera but down, to the tiny bouquet of yellow violets in her hand.

  “How about I take a shift?” I said to Val.

  Val yawned. “I’m okay.”

  “You need some sleep, and I haven’t had a moment alone with him.”

  “All right.” She stood. “He hasn’t been sleeping well.” She leaned into my father and raised her voice. “Kat’s going to sit with you for a bit, all right?”

  “Hmm? Kat?” He looked up at me, for a moment confused. “Oh, yes.”

  Val kissed him on the forehead and patted my arm as she left the room. Tonight my father’s breath was shallow, erratic. “The smoke getting to you?” I asked.

  “It’s funny,” he said. “I used to walk the trails on those hills with a loaded backpack and never got out of breath.”

  We both stared out the window for a time, at the fire blazing across the mountain in the night. “That fire isn’t going to give me the luxury of hanging around,” Dad said. “If I’m going to die at home, I better do it quick.”

  The fire was close. Throughout the late afternoon and evening, embers had drifted down, starting spot fires up and down the valley. I had put one fire out myself in our sawdust pile that evening, drowning it with water from a garden hose.

  “You’ll be with us for a while yet,” I said.

  He shook his head. “I wish I hadn’t slept the whole way back from the hospital this afternoon. I wanted to take in as much as I could on the drive. I don’t expect I’ll come by that way again. Not alive, in any case.”

  I didn’t reply. His voice was thin and whispery and there was a kind of transparency to the skin of his face, as if he wouldn’t simply die, but grow more and more translucent until he disappeared.

  I pointed at the wedding portrait of my parents. “Mom was telling me today that your romance with her all started the day the Japanese balloon blew up, when Grandpa threatened Mom and Grandma with a gun.”

  He turned to look at me. “She told you about that?”

  I nodded.

  “Huh. Well, I think she took notice of me there, all right, as the hero, you know. She started bringing little gifts to the cabin. The funniest things: a scrap of red velvet, a string of bells, little bouquets of violets.”

  I waited until he caught his breath again and then asked, “Was that the start of something between your Uncle Valentine and Grandma as well?”

  “They were better friends after that, if that’s what you mean. Valentine was over nearly every day, during those months John was in the hospital, helping Maud with the chores and in the garden. Helping in any way he could. Like I said, he built that greenhouse for her. But he made himself pretty scarce after John came back. He didn’t come over much. Though he sent notes to her.”

  “He wrote Grandma letters?”

  “I was the courier,” he said, and his voice was wheezy, “carrying them back and forth, making very sure your grandfather never knew anything about it, of course. I didn’t even tell your mother about it at the time.”

  “But they lived just across the field from each other.”

  “They couldn’t see much of each other when John was home; he wouldn’t have allowed it, or understood it. Lord knows Maud and Valentine should have got together. But Maud felt sorry for John, I think. She often wondered aloud how he would ever cope if anything were to happen to her.”

  I looked at my own wedding portrait, waiting until his breathing had settled before asking anything more. How would Ezra cope without me? “You think that’s why she stayed with Grandpa?” I asked. “Because she felt sorry for him?”

  “Who knows? I never understood why she stayed. I expect she and Valentine might have got together after John disappeared, even at the age they were then. But of course Maud passed away the day she heard the news that the search had been called off. The stress of it all, I imagine.”

  “Did you read any of the letters?”

  “No, no. Maud must have burned them. What if John had found them?”

  “And Valentine? Did he keep Grandma’s letters?”

  “Oh, girl, you have so many questions!”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s all right. Just give me a moment.” I held his hand as he laboured to catch his breath. “We never found any letters when we went through his things after his death,” he said finally. “I expect he would have destroyed her letters or hid them. John was the kind of man who would have looked through Valentine’s things if he had his suspicions. No one locked their doors then, except for John. He carried his keys with him everywhere he went.”

  “When I was a kid I came across one of Valentine’s tobacco cans under the floorboards of that old house.”

  “Were there letters in it?”

  “I don’t know. It was rusted shut. I never thought to look for it again. Mom didn’t like me going in that old house.”

  He nodded. “You said there was a man in there, a man in the wall. Scared the daylights out of your mother.”

  “Mom told me about that, but I don’t remember much of it myself.”

  “I thought you were talking about shadows, your own shadow, or our shadows when we were with you. That’s what I told your mother, to reassure her. But you insisted there was a man in that old house. He came out of the wall and went back into it. You didn’t like him. You called him a bad man. You said he was scared. Scared and sad.”

  I stared out the window, listening to the rasp of my father’s breathing. Outside falling embers caught air and flared up, like disembodied spirits.

  “You should take a look in case those letters are there,” he said. “Be a shame if they were lost to this fire.”

  “If I can get away in the morning, I’ll ask Jude if I can go in there to take a look for that can.”

  He closed his eyes and after a time his face tensed. I put a hand on his shoulder to comfort him but he opened his eyes looking confused, alarmed.

  “I didn’t think you were asleep,” I said.

  “The morphine. It makes me as fuzzy-headed as your mother.”

  “I shouldn’t be keeping you awake.”

  “No, no, I want to talk.”

  I pointed at his arm, the old wound there. “So, how did you get that scar? It wasn’t what you said, was it? A hunting accident. Was it Grandpa?”

  “Your mother doesn’t want me talking about it.”

  “I can always look it up, you know. If he did shoot you there’s undoubtedly something about it in the papers. Files going back to the first edition of the Observer are on microfiche at the library.”<
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  “You’d do that?”

  My father brought his hand to his mouth. “There’s no need to go to the library. Your grandmother kept all those stories. She filled a scrapbook with them; it had a Valentine’s Day card on the front. As I recall, the scrapbook is in that steamer trunk she brought over with her as a young bride. You’ve brought it down from the attic, I hope.”

  “I don’t know if Val thought of it.”

  “Good Lord, get it down from there. Your mother couldn’t bear it if that went up in smoke.”

  “So what happened?”

  He lay back and closed his eyes. “You can read it for yourself.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I had no right to bug you about it, especially now.”

  “It’s all right. We should have told you a long time ago.” Then he held my hand and sat up a little, as best he could. “Listen, I want to say something to you. I think I better do it now.” I waited as he coughed and caught his breath. “Things aren’t so good between you and Ezra, are they?”

  “No.”

  “He loves you, though, I think.”

  I nodded.

  “It’s a terrible thing to love a woman and not be able to reach her, to make her love you back in the same way. I don’t think I ever reached your mother that way, not like I wanted to.” He turned toward the bureau, to the wedding photo of him and my mother, and stared at it as he talked. “Earlier tonight I dreamed I was working on the railway in snowy open country, without a tree in sight—just one little bush sticking out of the snow. There were two of us working, me and a big man all dressed in black, with a big black hat like what your grandfather John used to wear. But I couldn’t see his face so I don’t know if it was him. We each had a small flat spade and we had to shovel sand the work train had dumped in between the tracks. The train was long gone, and it was getting dark when we finished, and there was nothing around us but snow and bush. That big man walked off into the night and I was left alone. I could see a house a long way off that had snow all over its roof but no lights on. It was that unfinished house on Valentine’s place. I knew your mother was inside, so I started to walk toward it. There were no roads or fences, and the snow was thigh-deep and bitter cold and a labour to push through. I just kept thinking when I got to that house Beth would open the door and let me in. But as much as I walked, I never got any nearer to that place.”

  He turned to me. “I see you trying so bloody hard with Ezra, and I love you for it. But I hate that you’re tired and unhappy all the time. It’s not doing Ezra any good either, if you can’t love him back the way he loves you.”

  He lifted an arm to the bureau and I leaned over the bed to hand him the photo he was reaching for. But he didn’t take it from me. It was my own wedding portrait, a photo Val had taken of Ezra and me standing at the doorway of the Turtle Valley Memorial Hall. Strange how a camera captures truths those in the photograph might not admit to each other, or even to themselves. There was too much distance between Ezra and me. He was reaching toward me, about to put his arm around me, and smiling into the camera, and I was turned from him, putting space between us, looking away.

  “You were still in love with Jude when you married Ezra, weren’t you?”

  I looked up at my father—his startling aqua-blue eyes—then back down at the photograph in my hands. “Yes,” I said.

  He tapped the glass on the portrait. “You remember what I said at the hall, at your wedding, just before I walked you down the aisle?”

  I nodded. He didn’t say anything more. He closed his eyes and appeared to drift off to sleep. I sat back in the chair, holding the wedding portrait in both hands. In that moment my father spoke of, Ezra had stood at the front of the hall next to the minister, waiting with his back to me, dressed in his black suit and tie, his thick, dark hair pulled back in a ponytail. We had both dressed in traditional wedding garb to please Ezra’s parents, although I would have preferred much less formal wear, especially in that rustic setting. I was at the door with my father, about to make my entrance, wearing that white gown I had felt coerced into buying. And Jude was staring at me from across the room. It was the first time we had seen each other since our affair had ended less than five months before. He stood behind the table where Lillian sat holding her stomach; she was eight months along with Andy at the time. Jude had not dressed up for the occasion as Lillian had. He wore only a T-shirt and jeans. His arms were crossed and his biceps bulged defiantly as we held each other’s gaze too long. I was the one who finally looked away.

  I don’t know if my father saw that exchange, if it was this that prompted him to whisper into my ear. Whatever the case, just before I walked down the aisle toward Ezra, he leaned into me so that only I could hear and said, “You can still get out of this, you know.”

  15.

  TO REACH THE ATTIC, I had to climb up a stepladder and through a hatch in the ceiling of the hall. The ceiling in the tiny attic itself was so low that I had to shuffle through the room on my knees. With each move I made, there was a crunch like brittle leaves, from the dry bodies of thousands of ladybugs that littered the shiplap floor and the stacks of cardboard boxes. Scooping up a handful, I was surprised to find that among the dead were a few still alive, their legs reaching sluggishly to my fingers in order to right themselves. I slid open the window to toss ladybug confetti to the porch roof below, and some of the insects flew up into the circle of yard light before disappearing into the night.

  Below the attic window my grandmother’s trunk was heaped high with more of my mother’s years of musings. I set these boxes and bags of her memories on the floor and opened the trunk. It smelled of naphtha flakes and was filled, as I remembered it, with the Cinderella things of another time that I’d so loved as a child: a fragile, painted paper fan; a pink-flowered china candleholder; a mother-of-pearl mirror, comb, and brush set that still held strands of Maud’s black and silver hair; cut-glass trinket dishes with embossed brass lids; Peerless ink bottles, fountain pens, and nibs; a Bible and hymnbook.

  I opened a Peek Frean cookie tin and found a rose sealed in wax. The wax had cracked and the flower within was dry and crumbling. It was the same rich red as the Bonica roses that bloomed around the unfinished house. Had Valentine given it to her? Would she have ever preserved a rose from John Weeks? Would he have thought to give her one?

  There were stacks of scrapbooks, and letters and postcards that my grandfather had sent my grandmother after he was back in Canada from the Great War, before she had made the trek across an ocean, and across a continent, to reach this homestead in British Columbia. Dear Girl, he called her, and he signed each letter, Your Affectionate Lover, J.W. On top of it all there was a roll of blueprints, plans for a house that was never built.

  I pulled out a scrapbook and leafed through it, then another and another, before finding what I was looking for. The cover of this scrapbook was adorned with a Valentine card. Two children climbing a ladder up to a harvest basket overflowing with hearts. To My Valentine. The scrapbook was almost entirely filled with newspaper clippings, something that had never interested me when I was a child. The first one read:

  TURTLE VALLEY IS JARRED BY

  SLIGHT TREMOR

  Some claim it was an earthquake; some assert it was an unusually heavy distant clap of thunder; others suggest it may have been a large land or rock-clearing blast, and still others, of an alarmist temperament, query whether it might have been a Jap balloon bomb.

  Whatever the cause or origin, the valley was jarred by some kind of an earth tremor last Thursday.

  The Japanese balloon my father had found. The blast when it was blown up. The blast that threw my grandfather back into the war, and back into Essondale. It was here, recorded in the newspaper. I looked at the date my grandmother had scrawled on the edge of the clipping. March 15, 1945. The night Valentine had stayed with her. I leafed quickly through the scrapbook, scanning the stories, then turned back to the cover. To My Valentine.

  Across th
e field, light poured from Jude’s home. I could clearly see him moving from one window to the next as he walked around the living room. The kiln shed was dark. Why was he up so late?

  “You up there, Kat?” Val called.

  “Yeah.”

  The stepladder creaked as she climbed up into the attic. “No change in Dad, eh?” she said.

  “He was sleeping soundly so I thought I’d slip up here for a few minutes and see what I could find.”

  Val reached into the trunk for a photo of our grandmother as a young woman, taken just shortly before she met my grandfather. She was dressed in her ambulance driver’s uniform of long dark skirts and a heavy coat that appeared too big for her. Her hat, flipped up on one side, made her look jaunty and adventurous, but the shadow she cast was a man in a large black hat approaching ominously from the gloom in the corner, like the bad guy in a comic book. She stood gripping the back of a chair with one hand; the other was balled into a loose fist. She looked very much as I did now, though she had been more than a decade younger than me when this photo was taken. Her long nose and full mouth, her dark hair and brows, the sloping shoulders that made her neck appear longer—these were all traits I had inherited. There was a wide-eyed look of anticipation about her that I sometimes caught in the mirror and often saw in my son, a mix of wonder and embarrassment, as if she knew she was about to receive a birthday surprise.

  “God, it could be a photo of you,” Val said.

  “Eerie, isn’t it?”

  She pointed at the scrapbook. “What have you got there?”

  “Dad told me this was here, in the trunk. I think I’ve seen all of Grandma’s scrapbooks before, but not this one. Mom never showed it to me, and she relegated this trunk to the attic when I got too curious about it. I’m beginning to see why.” I patted it. “There are clippings in here from 1965, stories of Grandpa’s disappearance and the search for him. But it starts in 1945, with the story about the explosion, when that Japanese balloon was blown up. All these stories except the first, about the explosion, are in some way about Valentine, and I think even that one was. Look at the cover.” The children, the harvest basket of hearts. To My Valentine.